Balancing the Secular and the Sacred

Swiss theologian Karl Barth encouraged pastors to study the world with the Scriptures in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He stood in a long line of Christians who have struggled to integrate the secular with the sacred, to come to terms with Jesus’ statement that his followers ought to be “in the world” but not “of the world” (John 17:11-16). As great Christian thinkers from the apostle Paul through Augustine to Luther and beyond have discovered, this is much easier said than done.

The word “secular” did not always mean “non-religious.” The word comes from the Latin saeculum which means “age” or “period.” It appears in the Latin Vulgate in such places as Matthew 28:20, where Jesus says he will be with us “usque ad consummationem sæculi” – until the consummation of the ages. Christian clergy of the Middle Ages were designated as either religious or secular, serving either in monasteries or out in the world. The secular, then, is what pertains to this age which Christ says “is passing away,” and its opposite is the age that is yet to come. To balance the secular and the sacred, then, is to balance life in this age with its day-to-day duties, while keeping an eye on the age that will be fully revealed at some eschatological point in time.

The Church is always tempted to either lose sight of life in this age in our focus on the next, or to focus so much on this age that eschatological hope disappears entirely. On one extreme we have ascetic monastics, or even the Amish, who seek as much visible separation from this age as possible. On the other extreme we have so-called “social gospel” proponents of liberal, mainline theology, where this age can become all there ever has been, is, or ever will be. In between are the rest of Christians, struggling with the temptation to go one way or the other. American Evangelicals are, of course, tempted in each direction, but predominantly it seems to me away from eschatological hope and toward an overemphasis on this age. One can see this in the tendency of some Evangelicals to become absorbed in political solutions and movements, or in “do-goodedness” and attempts to bring about a Kingdom of God on earth. Victory is not something we attain later after having borne our crosses of service now; it is something we can have now, and whether or not anything comes later is largely irrelevant.

This shift away from the coming reign to Christ’s reign here and now impacts the one arena where Christians are normally drawn away from the saecula and toward the divine: in worship. Many insist that worship must be “contemporary” – literally “with this age.” It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between some churches’ worship services and a rock concert on the one hand, or a political rally on the other. Yet worship should be one place where we are drawn away from life in this world to the life of the world to come. Christian artist “Nicole Nordeman” struggled with the question of worship that had lost its focus on the divine in her song “Tremble“:

Have I come too casually? Because it seems to me there’s something I’ve neglected / How does one approach a deity with informality and still protect the sacred? / ‘Cause you came and chose to wear the skin of all of us, and its easy to forget you left a throne / And the line gets blurry all the time between daily and divine and it’s hard to know the difference…

Christians serve a “secular” God, who chose to take human flesh in this age in order to begin the process of recreating it and us at the same time. Christ Jesus calls all secular people to be declared sacred in his name. Yet he uses things of this age – the spoken message of the Gospel, the water of baptism, the bread and wine of communion – to accomplish that end. The secular and sacred will be intertwinned with each other until God’s work of recreation in Jesus is finished, and the promise of the first Easter comes to fruition. Until then, we do well not to confuse this age with the age to come, or to lose sight of the one while working in, or for, the other.